A variety of audio and/or video delivery systems exist for delivering media content to a user's media playback device. For example, a cable delivery system may include a set-top box that transmits a television program to a user's television screen. Media content delivery systems often include a transcoder for transcoding media content that is received from a content source. For example, a media content source or provider, such as a cable network, may beam a channel in high definition television (HDTV) using MPEG-4 programming. The cable delivery system in a user's home may utilize a set-top box that supports MPEG-2-only. Therefore, the cable delivery system, via a transcoder, may transcode the MPEG-4 media content to a useable MPEG-2 format.
Existing techniques for transcoding media content are less than optimal for delivery to a media playback device. Often, the transcoder consumes an unnecessary amount of power to deliver audio and/or video to the media playback devices. For example, in a typical delivery system, the processing burden is on the transcoder to make the necessary conversions for delivery of content to the media playback devices, expending execution cycles to format the data. As a result of the processing burden on the transcoder, the number of inputs the transcoder can support is limited and, accordingly, the number of outputs the transcoder can support is also limited.